There will never come a time that I’m not astounded by the willingness of NFL owners and coaches to make fools of themselves trying to talk their way around the mere idea of signing Colin Kaepernick.

Let me make this very clear – there is no backup or free agent quarterback that has taken a team over this season that was a better football choice than Kaepernick. They might have been safer and less scrutinized, and they were certainly less of a political “risk” if you believe there is such a thing for the NFL (which I don’t).

There might have even been some football sabermetricians out there who legitimately believed that whatever second-rate QB they were throwing out there was a better “fit” for their team’s system.

(Sorry, it’s hard for me not to use sarcastic quotations marks here.)

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Regardless of all of those subjective points of view, Colin Kaepernick is more than capable of being a starting NFL quarterback. So at the very least, he should have fielded several phone calls by now, as injuries and pure mediocrity have plagued teams through the first seven games of this season.

And yet, when Bruce Arians took questions about the idea of bringing in the best pro-ready free agent quarterback available, this was his weird cop-out response:

“We’ve never had more than two on our roster since I’ve been here. We liked Blaine Gabbert so much that we kept him this year. So, we’re really where we always are. We may look for a practice squad arm.”

First of all, it’s a straight up lie that Arians has only kept two on the roster in Arizona. Andrew Joseph over at For The Win completely obliterated that poorly assembled excuse with a series of receipts – aka, archived depth charts.

Secondly, no one thinks he should be starting him behind Drew Stanton and Blaine Gabbert. They’re clearly not asking him about his plans to fill out the bottom of the QB depth chart.

When Carson Palmer went down with his 235th injury in Week 7’s blowout loss to the Rams, this is the guy that replaced him:

In case you were wondering how it's going for Drew Stanton/Supergirl at QB after the Carson Palmer injury pic.twitter.com/9aRClY8bKO

Drew Stanton – of the 14 career touchdowns to 20 interceptions and 52.7% completion percentage – is who Arians contends is the best choice for the Cardinals. A guy who’s started just 13 games in seven and a half seasons.

Cool.

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Gabbert’s a real interesting choice too, as he and Kaepernick played on the 49ers together for three seasons. When Kaepernick became too much of a hassle last season and the woeful Niners needed to try to shift the blame for their disastrous franchise onto an easy scapegoat, they benched him for Gabbert.

So Arians would have us believe that he looked at both those guys’ careers and their performances on the same exact same team last season and decided that Gabbert was the better option?

The only reason he even started a game was because the 49ers were horrendous yet again, and they didn’t feel like dealing with the drama anymore. They were throwing their hands up when the decided to start Gabbert over Kaepernick plain and simple.

If you’re an Arizona Cardinals fan, or a fan of any other underperforming team with a lot of talent that shouldn’t be giving up on their seasonyet, then you should be legitimately mad that coaches and owners aren’t prioritizing potential. Cardinals should fans know that Stanton and Gabbert aren’t the answers to their problems, and they deserve better.